If you need to know anything about me, it’s that I come from a Democratic blue collar background and
I’ve never lost my faith in unions. I’ve grieved for them over the years, predicting the very thing that has happened
would happen if we allowed the one protection for workers to be stripped away.
Unions give workers a unique, collective voice that translates into the only power they’ll ever have over management: the power to demand equitable pay, safe working conditions, and, not least, human dignity. We don’t talk about it often enough, especially now, when workers are in danger of being nothing but unprotected slaves, indentured to the every-present oligarchy. We have a billionaire class now, thanks to decades-long attacks on workers and trickle-down propaganda meant to lure those workers into believing all it takes to get rich is to turn against common sense and disregard their own best interests in order to give more to the rich.
@ConnieSchultz shared this thread on Twitter today and I had to share it here. This is what Twitter does best. It leads us to people we might never have found on our own and opens up conversations that must take place if we’re ever going to solve our problems.
It tells us we’re not alone.
This was written by
Daniel Wasik, who says he has worked as a laborer for 40 years. I’m following him now and I hope more people will after reading what he has written. His is a powerful voice.
Sometimes long threads like this draw enough attention so that readers want those thoughts to be presented in essay form. That’s where
Thread Reader comes in. It’s an app that does just that–it creates an essay out of a thread. (I don’t understand why these great threads aren’t in essay form in the first place, but we’ll take what we can get.)
Here is the thread on Twitter. (For Thread Reader go
here.)